Early applications to the McDonough School of Business grew almost 50 percent this year, fueling a university-wide increase in early applications of 31 percent over last year.

Early applications to Georgetown’s three other undergraduate schools also increased this year. The early application deadline was Nov. 1.

The MSB received 1,025 applications – up from 688 last year – a nearly 49 percent boost.

MSB Dean George Daly credited two main reasons for the jump.

“First, there is a total increased interest in Georgetown University overall, and second, [the] MSB’s rise in the rankings of several national business magazines,” he said.

Over the past two years, the MSB has risen from 38th to 13th place in The Wall Street Journal’s rankings of regional business schools and has been ranked highly by Forbes, BusinessWeek and the U.S. News and World Report magazines.

The university is in the process of constructing a new center for the MSB, which administrators have said should boost the school’s national prominence.

The School of Nursing and Health Studies also received significantly more applicants than last year – a 30.3 percent increase from 320 to 417 applicants. Early applications to the NHS more than doubled last year; the school received 156 early applications in 2005.

NHS Dean Bette Keltner said the escalation is likely the result of a heightened interest in health care among high school students nationwide.

“Health care is hot. At NHS, we have created four different majors that reflect the broad ways in which science is translated into practice,” Keltner said. “Prospective students interested in [the] NHS see a future associated with the fields of health care management and policy, human science, international health and nursing. All of these programs have experienced a growth in applications.”

Georgetown College received 3,266 applications, up from 2,562 in 2006. This increase of 27.5 percent is on par with the School of Foreign Service’s 28.5 percent increase, from 1,002 to 1,288.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Charles Deacon said the 31 percent school-wide increase – from 4,560 applicants in 2006 to 5,975 this year – was expected after several top universities dropped their early admissions programs.

“Three elite institutions – Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Virginia – have eliminated their early application programs,” he said. “Those three universities have a significant impact on our own applicant pool. Without their early programs, there are approximately 8,000 to 10,000 students trying to get into a school that’s non-binding, and so they have a good reason to apply to Georgetown.”

Deacon said this year’s class is one of the most competitive in recent history.

Applicants could apply to Georgetown online for the first time this year, but Deacon said he was not sure what effect this had on the number of early applications. He said he anticipates it could increase applications from international applicants, especially in the regular decision process, because it eliminates the potential for the application to be lost in the mail as well as the cost of postage.

Because of this year’s record high number of applicants, Deacon said no more than 18 percent of early applicants will be admitted. Last year’s overall acceptance rate was just under 21 percent.

Deacon said he expects the number of regular decision applicants to rise from 16,000 to 18,000, due in part to national coverage of Georgetown’s men’s basketball team’s Final Four appearance in March.

“If this all proves true, we will regularly admit 18 percent of the applications. The percentage we admit early acts as a function of this percentage. So, 18 percent will be the maximum for early admittance,” Deacon said.

Deacon said that while the yield rate, or percentage of accepted students who choose to matriculate, has typically been around 60 percent in recent years, this number will likely decrease this year. He said the admissions committee will have to be more judicious in accepting applicants, which may lead to more applicants being put on the waitlist.

Deacon said that the size of the Class of 2012 should be around 1,580 students.

“In the long run, this is all good for us,” Deacon said. “We will now spend more energy trying to yield those more competitive students who would have gone to a Harvard or Princeton. We will try to develop programs that get the faculty involved to open dialogue with these students. In the past it was about giving them more and more information.”

Deacon said he expected more students than usual to turn down acceptances at Georgetown in favor of the schools that no longer offer early application.

Jillian Angeline, a senior at Rutgers Preparatory School in New Jersey, said she applied early because she fell in love with Georgetown.

“The fact that the elite institutions eliminated their early programs did not have any bearing on my applying to Georgetown [through] early action,” she said. “I fell in love with the school when I visited. I definitely still would have applied if the early programs were not eliminated.”

Alexandra Scoptur, a senior at the Divine Savior Holy Angels High School in Milwaukee, Wis., applied early to the College, said the increase in applications does not necessarily indicate that more students are putting Georgetown first on their wish lists.

“I know that a number of my friends who have applied from other high schools have taken advantage of Georgetown’s early action process, thinking that there is no harm in submitting it early,” she said. “It makes me nervous and kind of agitated because this is the school that I want to go to the most. Shouldn’t the people who really want to go there have the opportunity to apply first, and then everyone else?”